


Murphy's Law

by Pemm



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Gen, femclasses, texas toast if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 18:47:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pemm/pseuds/Pemm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pyro stumbled well clear, grumbling unintelligibly under the mask. They had pulled up their flamethrower like a shield, and Engineer looked them up and down before saying, “You run out there with all the rest of us every day and get shot up and blown up and everything else, what’s got you so skittish off the field? Respawn’ll still catch ya even if there is an accident.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Murphy's Law

 

  
_If I could take the fire out from the water_  
_I'd take you where nobody knows you_  
_And nobody gives a damn_

 —“I’ll Believe In Anything”, Wolf Parade.

 

* * *

 

 

“I think that ‘bout does it. Don’t you?”

“Mmhhdh. Hhddht hafe?”

Engineer threw a glance toward her teammate, reaching up to flick a stray lock of red hair out of her eyes. “Course it’s safe, y’ninny. I built it.”

From across the contraption, Pyro lifted their head and delivered the most deadpan stare Engineer had ever seen come out of a blank rubber mask. “Hh hhst phourr hkspldded.”

“They didn’t explode. That was a minor malfunction in the heating gauge.”

“Hhey _khspldded_ hnd Hhi mmlmsd _hhyed_.”

Engineer rolled her eyes, letting the the wind that curled around the open barn door tug at her. It kicked up dust and stale hay into her face, remnants from when a real farm stood where the RED base was. Across from her, with their back to the dark of the unlit barn, Pyro stood a respectful distance from Engineer’s newest project.

The wind tugged a lock of hair out from behind Engineer’s ear, and she stuffed it back in under the bandana keeping her bun pulled together. “You didn’t ‘almost die’, neither. C’mon, I don’t feel like lugging this thing outta here on my own.”

Pyro sighed, long and exaggerated, and wrapped both gloved hands around the end of the metal thing between them. Together the two of them hefted it into the air and carried it out of the barn that Engineer had claimed as her workspace.

“Careful, now—”

“Hhi’m mmlhys hhrphll—”

“—nice and easy—”

The machine touched down on the Badlands dirt with a soft creak. Engineer stepped back and beamed, admiring the way it shone in the sunlight. “Wouldja lookit that! Ha! BLUs won’t ever know what hit ‘em!”

Damn if she wasn’t proud of this one. Didn’t look much different from her old sentries, sure but her new prototype was crowned with an unassuming-looking box. The BLU engineer would probably go green with envy when he heard she’d rigged rockets onto her models.

Pyro edged around the back of it to join her, keeping well out of its line of fire. “Hht’s hmmhhrehsv,” they admitted. “Hht’s mmt hhlohded, hhs hht?”

“Nah, it ain’t loaded. Yet. I got to set up the targets. I’d ask yer help, but you’d have yourself a conniption over the sentry goin’ off somehow anyway.”

Pyro shrugged. They both knew she was right.

 

* * *

 

The level-three sentry, as Engineer called it, worked flawlessly, and her prediction about the BLU team had been right on the money. Their counterparts was thrown out of Thunder Mountain in a right hurry, leaving RED to relax a few days while the higher-ups sorted out paperwork.

After dinner on the eve of their victory, Engineer settled herself in with a Red Shed and her latest drafts for a machine that could both dry your hair and shoot down a moving target from 500 yards. She had just cracked off the lid of her beer when her silence was broken.

“All I’m saying is, like, I mean what if Pyro _ain_ ’t a girl, what if they’s been a dude this whole time, y’know what I’m sayin?” Engineer looked up to find Scout trotting backwards into the room, her hands spread questioningly toward a following Demo. “It’d be weird is what it’d be, right, I mean s’like, well I dunno what it’d be like, but—”

“Can it,” Demo said wearily, throwing herself down onto one of the raggedy kitchen chairs. “I don’t see why it matters what Pyro got under the suit, d’you? They fight the good fight, yeah? An’ even if they do ‘appen to be a man, I ain’t e’er seen ‘em in the showers.”

“Well I mean yeah I guess but—”

“Pyro’s a woman,” Engineer said. Both her teammates looked dead at her.

“She told ya?” Scout sputtered, eyes wide. “Or you figure it out? Howdja know?”

“Easy. On account’a she been livin’ with eight other women all this time, an’ she ain’t run for the hills yet.”

Demo slapped her knee and laughed, and Scout whined something about that not counting at all. Engineer just smirked to herself and flipped over her blueprints.

 

* * *

 

Engineer didn’t know, of course, not really. She had sort of a guess, but it didn’t seem quite the proper thing to go asking about out of the blue. And for the most part, she agreed with Demo—as long as Pyro did their job, it didn’t matter much to her what they had in their suit.

She was curious about another thing, though.

_“Hhrphll!”_

Engineer stopped in her tracks, steadying her grip on the crate of piping and metal she was moving from one end of the barn to the other. Pyro was cringing in her blind spot, though the pieces sticking up into the air went too high to pose any real threat. “Whoa, hoss,” Engineer said. “It weren’t anywhere near you, calm down.”

Pyro stumbled well clear, grumbling unintelligibly under the mask. They had pulled up their flamethrower like a shield, and Engineer looked them up and down before saying, “You run out there with all the rest of us every day and get shot up and blown up and everything else, what’s got you so skittish off the field? Respawn’ll still catch ya even if there is an accident.”

Her teammate looked at her for a long few seconds, then tilted their head sideways in that aggravating way that meant they had no intention of answering. Engineer set her crate down and folded her arms across her chest. “An’ that flamethrower, you made that thing yourself, didn’t ya?”

“Hheah.”

“I seen it blow up on ya more than a few times.” Engineer chewed her bottom lip, suddenly curious. “Y’know, and I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ ‘bout your worth or not, but how’d you even land a job like this? Y’all jump at shadows quicker’n a rabbit.”

Pyro went very still. Then they heaved a sigh, exaggerated to make it through the thick suit. “Hhll mhll yhu lhatrr. Hhlrrt?”

Later, huh. Engineer digested this and after a moment, nodded. “Alright. Later it is.”

 

* * *

 

 “Later” was a sight longer in coming than Engineer had anticipated. That night she got caught up in a poker game with Sniper, Demo and Soldier; the next two days Pyro was busy doing, well, Pyro things.

After that, Engineer just plain couldn’t find her teammate. Pyro vanished after work and only cropped up at meals, and never answered when she knocked on their door. After a week of this, Engineer was forced to draw the conclusion that she was being avoided.

Of course, that didn’t sit too good with her.

“Alright,” Engineer said. She’d had to wait outside Pyro’s door until Scout yelled it was dinner. She didn’t much like having to corner them, but she didn’t take kindly to being blown off, neither. “It’s later, campfire. You ain’t gone and changed your mind on me, have ya?”

Pyro, standing in their doorway, sort of tensed up. Their fingers tightened on the doorframe. Engineer looked them over, felt her heart soften. “S’alright if ya did. You don’t got to tell me nothin’ you don’t wanna. I just want to know one way or the other.”

At her words, her Pyro sagged. There was a stillness in the air, and then Pyro said, “Nho, Hhi... Mmhnnyht, hh brrn. Hhi’ll shhw yhu.”

_Tonight, the barn. I’ll show you._

 

* * *

 

When she eased the barn door open that night, Engineer expected darkness. Instead her eyes were drawn to a little light far off in a corner, toward the very back. She stepped inside, not pulling the door quite shut behind her, and called, “Pyro?”

The light went off, and Engineer was left with only what the moon poured in through the crack in the door.. A few seconds later the light returned, wavering still. She moved toward it, taking careful steps in the darkness—she had never been in here after dark, and so had never bothered to find the light switch—until she arrived a few feet from Pyro. “Hey,” she started, trying to break the heavy tension the seemed to cloud the air. “Pretty dark, huh?”

“Yheah,” Pyro said. Engineer could barely see them watching her just past the tiny lighter in their hand, only their mask visible. Then they sighed audibly, and shifted enough to drag out a battery-powered lamp from behind them. They put it on the ground between them and flicked it on. Engineer sat down and waited.

For a while Pyro didn’t do anything. Buying time, maybe. But soon, careful and precise they reached up and pulled their mask up enough that Engineer could make out the dark shape of a mouth. An unfamiliar voice said,  “I’d really like it if you’d keep this to yourself,” and Engineer almost didn’t realize it was Pyro speaking.

“I—yeah. Sure, sure thing.” Engineer’s curiosity chewed at her. “Secret’s safe with me.”

Pyro sighed. With a motion as quick as someone ripping off a bandaid, they pulled off their mask.

At first Engineer couldn’t see anything but the faint shape of their face. Pyro let the mask drop, and reached out to pull the lamp into their lap. Before she could stop herself, Engineer leaned away and let slip a low gasp as Pyro’s obsessive dedication to her secrecy came, quite literally, to light.

For the life of her Engineer could not have said what exactly Pyro’s face looked like. All that came to her at first was the sickening, alarmed sensation that follows the sight of an auto accident or a train derailment. Disfigurement was too pale a word. Pyro’s face looked like it had been shattered a dozen times and crudely pieced back together by someone with only a faint idea of what a human looked like. A melted ear, a crooked and stunted nose missing chunks in the cartilage, what patches of hair remained on their head were thin and limp. Their lips were twisted into a permanent half-sneer, their eyebrows were gone. Scars dragged over their temple and jaw. Engineer stared.

There was a sigh and the new voice said, “Take a picture.”

“S—sorry,” Engineer managed, called back to the present and her own behavior. “Shoot, my apologies. I, uh. I didn’t—”

“You didn’t mean to, you weren’t expecting that, you weren’t really staring at me, sorry, sorry, please don’t hit you,” Pyro said. Weariness threaded their voice like cracks in a sidewalk. It was a quiet voice, higher than Engineer had expected, and at the same time warped and heavy. It left her feeling uneasy, her brain telling her that wasn’t what humans sounded like. “It’s fine, I’m used to it.”

They didn’t sound fine, not really, but Engineer didn’t push the issue. She chewed the inside of her cheek a second, trying to taking Pyro in without gawking. It occurred to her that her teammate was not wearing her ubiquitous chemsuit—just a loose-fitting shirt, ragged jeans.  From the neck down they looked just as bad: a fingertip missing here, a foot twisted at a slightly strange angle. Their chest was flat, but the rest of their body collected as curves too soft for a man, leaving their sex as ambiguous as their voice. Heavy scars trailed over one arm, disappearing into the sleeve, and the other arm, on closer inspection, wasn’t an arm at all. Instead it was a collection of wires and rods, of smooth plastic and metal joints. 

“Well,” Engineer said, “I get why you’re paranoid ‘bout gettin’ hurt, now.”

Pyro laughed, kind of. It was a scratchy, uncomfortable sound.

 

* * *

 

 “I lost it in an explosion.”

Engineer almost didn’t hear them, too absorbed in their prosthetic arm, which was old and battered. They had let her take a look at it—“Since it’s you,” Pyro had said. “I always thought you’d like it, anyway.” It took her a full ten seconds of picking apart the mechanics with her eyes to realize she had been spoken to. “…Ah. I’m—I’m real sorry to hear that.”

Pyro hadn’t wanted more light than their lamp, in the barn. Might attract unwanted attention, after all. Everyone on the team knew Scout had nights where she couldn’t sleep and went running instead, and that Soldier occasionally watched the moon until sunrise to ensure it hadn’t “gone Commie” on them. But they’d agreed (albeit a little reluctantly) to Engineer’s suggestion of going outside, where the full moon was bright enough to at least see a little better by.

The air was still warm, even this long after sundown, and there was no wind. Pyro had halted right in the doorway of the barn, where they could slip back into the darkness should they choose. Engineer hardly blamed them. Their mask dangled in their other hand.

“Yeah,” Pyro continued. “That one was my fault. I kind of set a car on fire.”

“On purpose?”

Pyro shifted their weight, and Engineer let their arm drop. They rolled their shoulder, and something inside the arm’s casing rattled, like it had come loose. “Yeah. I was, I dunno, I was trying to make a statement to my foster parents. I was sixteen and angry. And I just wanted to set a car on fire.” They leaned against the old wood of the barn door, looking up at the moon. “It blew up. Lost my arm and one tit. Then I got breast cancer a couple years ago. There goes the other one. Can you believe that?”

“Shoot, that’s awful.”

“That’s my life.” They—she, Engineer supposed, and wasn’t it a relief she wasn’t going to have to ask?—she looked back at Engineer. One of her pupils wasn’t dilated. A false eye, maybe. The moonlight colored her scars in strange ways. “I mean, I could probably get into the Guiness records with all of it, seriously. Car accidents, boat accidents. I was in a plane crash once, _and_ a building collapse. Pyromania doesn’t help. Not crackhead parents either. Got away from them pretty quick, at least. I’ll do you a favor, I won’t tell you that story.”

Engineer winced. This wasn’t what she had expected Pyro to be keeping under wraps, none of it. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

“I can put the mask back on if you want.”

“No, you do whatever you want. This ain’t ‘bout me.”

Pyro laughed again, and this time it sounded a little warmer. “Thanks.”

“So, but you ain’t answered the question I asked, yet.”

“Right, how I got on the team.” She shrugged. “I kept burning things. I couldn’t really get myself to stop, even when I was scared shitless about getting hurt. Eventually I burned something so big it got RED’s attention, I guess. They said they’d get me a better prosthetic, and I’d get to light stuff up and not worry about having another reconstructive surgery. And this,” she added, tapping the mask in her real hand.

“I can see the appeal, there.”

“Yeah.” Pyro slouched a little, turning the infamous mask over, brushing off the lenses. “And no one really cares if I look like a girl or not.”

 

* * *

 

“Hht’s thss?” Pyro said, tilting her head to the side.

Engineer cleared sawdust and metal scrap off from the makeshift workbench, two tall sawhorses with a plank set across them. Wordlessly, she unrolled the bundle of cloth she had placed there a few seconds before. “Thought you might be interested. It ain’t much, I didn’t get a great look at yours, but I figured I might be able to put some improvements together.”

The mechanical arm she had constructed over the week since their talk shone in the light that filtered into the barn. It wasn’t much in Engineer’s eyes, needed some improvements, but it was a sleeker design than the contraption RED had given her.

And truth be told, Engineer felt bad—like she’d bullied Pyro into revealing herself. She hadn’t, she thought, but the guilt was there all the same. It wasn’t much of an apology, but it was all she could come up with “I’m still workin’ on maybe gettin’ a  wrist-mounted flamethrower on it, but—“

Pyro had gotten quiet. She laid a hesitant hand on the smooth metal, dragging her knuckles over it. Engineer swallowed. Maybe she’d overstepped her boundaries. “Hope you don’t mind none.”

Pyro looked up at her. Before Engineer could do anything, she had two rubber-suited arms thrown around her neck in a crushing hug. For a second Engineer locked up, startled—then she returned it, a smile creeping onto her face.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a fill for the excellent [tf2promptfest](http://tf2promptfest.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr!
> 
> The prompt was _Engineer (either gender or faction) & Pyro - fire has no gender._
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
